When Northern California Ballet in Paradise lost its studio and storage unit in the Butte County Camp Fire late last year, its annual holiday performance of “The Nutcracker” was put on indefinite hold due to the devastating loss of its costumes.
Despite predictions of a rainstorm, 85 volunteers descended on the McKinley Rose Garden in early January for the annual prunathon organized by the Friends of East Sacramento, the nonprofit that manages the care and events at the city’s public garden.
Around four years ago, I wrote a story about the death of an elderly neighbor. Her name was Hazel Cramer, and she passed away peacefully at home in late 2014 at the age of 97.
She lived in her home for 80 years after moving there with her parents as a teenager. Over the years, Hazel was married and widowed three times. She was survived by a few relatives who lived far from California and tended to her as best they could from long distance. Hazel had no children.
It’s a clever maneuver to help solve a problem that has bedeviled Sacramento politicians for decades. Struggling to make good on a 2016 campaign promise to end the scourge of homelessness, Mayor Darrell Steinberg has widened the field and press-ganged the Sacramento City Council into action.
The American experience is by and large the immigrant experience. Millions of people from all over the world have come to our great nation in order to find opportunity and freedom and to pursue happiness. Those last two things are unique to America. Our founders enshrined the phrase “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” in the Declaration of Independence.
